What They Don’t Tell You About SEO – Part 2
Mar 3 2008

Billiard Cupcakes – Photo by PinkCakeBox (flickr)
billiards-pinkcakebox.jpgAs a follow on to my What They Don’t Tell You About SEO – Part 1 post, here goes Part 2.

So now we are about 2 ½ months and 3 ½ payments into Search Engine Optimization with SpryDev.  We’ve made several changes to our site based on some great recommendations by Brian Massey at Customer Chaos and now we wait and measure the results.  We have seen an increase in trial account sign ups and a few more sales, but I’m still waiting for the landslide! 🙂

I know it is sometimes an experimental process with keyword selection, and I know since we aren’t selling cupcakes (i.e., a well understood product) that things might take a little longer.  I know all of this and yet I still want (dare I say need) to see those results immediately because I’m fundraising.  With every presentation I make, the more users I can tell potential investors have signed up, the more compelling the story becomes and the chances of getting funding increase ever so slightly.  Sort of a + b = c stuff.  Sometimes those tiny incremental changes can make all the difference.

I was reading some blogs and came across a neat tool called Website Grader that tells you how your website ranks with regards to SEO.  Social Media Mom mentioned it and when I ran the tool a distant memory was triggered because I was sure I had seen reference to this site before and lo and behold Pearl at Interesting Observations had mentioned it back in October 2007!  I can’t remember the score I had on my blog when I ran it then, but I ran a report for both http://www.babblesoft.com/ and http://entrepremusing.wpengine.com/ and here are the results:

Babble Soft

Score: 67 out of 100 (a D grade – wah!)

Google PageRank: 5

Google Indexed Pages: 66

Last Google Crawl Date: February 25, 2008

Traffic Rank: Top 8.01%

Inbound Links: 2,815

I also discovered we were not yet listed in the Yahoo! Directory but that has since been corrected and now we are.  We are still waiting for DMOZ and ZoomInfo to acknowledge our submissions.  I know SpryDev has submitted us for many more directories.  For some reason, this tool hasn’t really put the fact together that the related blog is this one.  I hope at the next Google crawl date, we move out of the D range.  Being the overachiever that I am, getting close to a failing grade makes me, well uh, let’s say not happy.

entrepreMusings

Score: 95 out of 100 (an A – yay!)

Google PageRank: 5

Google Indexed Pages: 334

Last Google Crawl Date: February 28, 2008

Traffic Rank: Top 4.08%

Inbound Links: 5,699

And that’s despite not being listed in Yahoo! or the other directories.  I haven’t done any formal SEO on my blog (i.e., the report even tells me I don’t have page titles and descriptions) but I know the high rank is probably primarily due to the fact that I frequently update the blog making it fun and interesting for those Google spiders and my readers to reference.

So my conclusion is that even if you have hired an SEO firm, take time to check out other SEO tools out there like Website Grader.  You might just find something to ask your firm about and learn something about the process along the way.  Even the best of teams and people sometimes require a little oversight.  If they are a good team, they won’t get defensive and they’ll work to fix it right away and make it up to you with hopefully more than yummy looking billiard cupcakes!

Stay tuned for more of my SEO journey that may involve cupcakes (or more likely other random pictures) by subscribing to my blog here!  If you have an SEO experience you’d like to share, please don’t hesitate to leave a delicious comment below.

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SEO Here I Come!
Dec 11 2007

After doing some research on hiring an SEO firm, I decided to go with the full service firm option.  It wasn’t an easy decision and I was concerned about spending the money, but now it’s done.  I just signed the paperwork with SpryDev for our search engine optimization internet marketing campaign!

SpryDev is based in Austin, Texas and I found out about them from a reply their founder, Ben Finklea, left on the Bootstrap Austin email list.  I had been thinking that I needed to find someone to help me with SEO and there was his email with his guarantee:

By the end of your contract you will have at least as much additional business from your Web site as you spend on our services…  or we’ll work for FREE until you do.

I took it as a sign.  Of course I checked out a few others but given that time is of the essence (I will start fundraising in 1Q 2008), he is based in Austin (I can meet with him face to face if any issues arise), and I didn’t have to get anyone else’s approval (I’m still bootstrapping) except for Erin’s (my husband), I made the decision to go with them fairly soon after our initial conversation. 

Ben must be pretty darn confident about his services, and based on our few discussions he seems like an honest guy.  I have heard stories about bad SEO experiences so I was paying particular attention to what he was saying and how he was saying it.  He didn’t act like he knew everything and seemed interested in learning about new things.   He said they haven’t worked with a company in the parenting space before, but he did some preliminary research and felt like he and his team would be able to increase our web profits and that he would be able to cover his guarantee.

He was proud of the fact that his firm has never engaged in paid link campaigns to increase their clients’ rankings…especially since Google recently updated PageRanks of several sites.  He was also proud of the fact that they didn’t follow a practice of internal linking between different pages within a domain to increase rankings.  I didn’t know this but apparently Google announced they would only count links to one domain so if people were linking between “www.companyname.com” to “products.companyname.com” those internal links will no longer be counted when determining search results.  Honestly, I don’t know why people would have thought that would work or why Google’s algorithms wouldn’t have already taken that into consideration.

Rose Holston is the project manager for Babble Soft.  I’ve already filled out a fairly extensive questionnaire about our market that she will use to help create the internet marketing/SEO plan.  I mentioned some of the target markets that Naomi mentioned on her post about ‘monsters and pants.’  Thanks Naomi!  Rose has two kids and she could instantly relate to the need for Baby Insights.  She is a self-professed anal retentive Excel spreadsheet mama.  I wonder what kind of keywords she will come up with to reach that audience.  🙂

I told them I would be blogging about my SEO/SEM full service firm experience in order to help other entrepreneurs with their SEO decisions.   So check back often and feel free to share your SEO thoughts so others can learn as well.  I am looking forward to working with SpryDev and to making significantly more money than what I end up paying them!

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